Page 82 of Queen of Anarchy (Dirty Broken Savages 2)

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Priest

Gage takesthe lead as always. Not wasting any time, he sets something up with Julian, reaching out to ask for a meeting and saying we have a proposition for him.

“He seemed suspicious, but he agreed,” he tells us when he’s done.

That makes sense, considering everything that’s happened. But the last time we made a deal with him, just yesterday, he got a lot of money out of it, so it’s not surprising that he agreed in the long run.

There’s some time before we’re due to meet up with him, so everyone goes their separate ways to get some things done while we wait.

The dog—or Bullwinkle, as Knox has been calling him this morning—sniffs around me as I wash things in the kitchen. We have a dishwasher, but sometimes I prefer to just clean things up by hand. Knox never remembers to rinse his fucking dishes anyway, so it’s easier to just handle it myself. Keeps my head clear.

“What do you want?” I ask the dog, flicking water at his head.

He barks and snaps at the air as if he could bite the water out of it. It makes a little smile tug at my lips to see him acting carefree and joyful again. He was just as stressed as the rest of us when River didn’t come home, pacing the area in front of his bowl and looking to the door every time a car went by.

For a dog, he’s surprisingly sensitive to the shit that goes on in this house, and now that all his people are back together, he seems happy again.

I dry my hands off and lean down to pet him, scratching behind his ears. His brown fur was a little dull and matted when he first came to live with us, but it’s shinier and softer now—probably because he’s sleeping indoors and eating real dog food rather than whatever he can get out of dumpsters.

“It’s all fine,” I tell him. “Everyone is back where they belong.”

He licks at my hand and then goes to curl up under the kitchen table.

When the dishes are done and drying in the rack, I find myself wandering the house aimlessly. I feel a bit… agitated. Not in a bad way, not in the way that makes me feel like I need to hit something or lock everything down tight to get myself under control.

But it feels like all my nerve endings were turned off before, keeping things muted and calm, and now all of a sudden I can feel again. Everything feels… extra. Louder, more vivid, more intense than usual. The dog barking, the sound of someone honking their horn down the street, all of it is turned up higher than normal in my head.

Even the lights in the house seem brighter somehow. It’s not bad, I’m just much more aware of everything than I was before, and it’s playing with my mind in a weird way.

I wander into the piano room and sit down at the bench, running one hand over the cool, polished wood. I start to play something, letting my fingers dance over the keys the way they always do.

It soothes me, like usual, but even this feels different now.

The music I’m playing hits me harder than usual, and I feel it more deeply than I ever have before. It’s more than just my fingers on the keys now.

It feels like I can hear all the notes, like they all strike me in different ways. I guess this is what people mean when they say they get moved by music. It has depth to it. Emotion, in a way. Something I’ve been closed off to for so long I basically forgot what it was like to experience it.

I switch to a different song, something slower and more melodic, and that hits me just as hard. It’s interesting, even while being very strange.

River comes in in the middle of the second song. She’s quiet, but I still sense her the second she steps into the room. My skin tingles with the awareness of her presence, and I feel her moving behind me, walking closer to the piano and then coming around the side so she can climb up onto the top.

She sits on it like she’s a queen on a throne, legs spread in front of me just like she did the last time we were both in here.

This time, I don’t ignore her. Or I don’tpretendto, at least. I couldn’t do it last time either, but this time there’s not even the pretense that I’m ignoring her.

“That’s bad for the piano,” I say mildly, running my fingers through a complicated little sequence.

“Do you want me to get down?” she asks.

I don’t answer. Instead, I just lean forward and rest my head on her thigh, dropping a kiss there, below the little shorts she threw on before breakfast. Her skin is soft and smooth, and even though her thighs are littered with scars, she’s so fucking beautiful.

She runs her fingers through my hair in soothing motions, and I let my own fingers go still on the keys, letting myself just feel her. She’s always been so bright and strong on my radar, even when I didn’t want her to be. Even when I hated her and would have rathered see her dead than in our lives.

But now it’s so much bigger. It’s like she’s the sun, and I have to orbit around her, have to make sure she’s safe. She still smells like my body wash from this morning’s shower, but with her own scent under it, and I breathe her in.

Even though I can feelherso much more than usual too, it’s soothing in a way. More comforting than jarring.

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